time: the refreshing river 



that a resumption on such terms would be a losing transaction, and 

 that individual ownership under State-suzerainty ought to continue." 

 George, who in his Progress and Poverty^ had quite rightly advocated 

 the nationalisation of the land, expecting it, however, to solve all 

 social problems, replied with an attack {A Perplexed Philosopher^ 

 which Spencer much resented. To George's accusation of consorting 

 with Dukes, Spencer replied that it was only in a body partly founded 

 by himself, the London Ratepayers' Defence League ! It was a poor 

 defence. Another controversy was with the Italian penologist Enrico 

 Ferri,^ who found that Spencer "stopped half-way in the logical 

 consequences of his doctrine." In Ferri's view, natural selection and 

 the struggle for existence in human society should not be interpreted 

 as between individuals, but between classes. "Spencer believes," 

 wrote Ferri in 1895 (loc. cit), "that universal evolution rules all 

 orders of phenomena with the exception of the organisation of 

 property, which he declares is destined to exist eternally in its indi- 

 vidualistic form. Socialists, on the other hand, believe that it will 

 itself also undergo a radical transformation . . . towards an increasing 

 and complete socialisation of the means of production, which con- 

 stitute the physical basis of social life and which ought not to, and 

 will not, remain in the hands of a few individuals." Spencer com- 

 plained bitterly in a letter to the Italian press. 



With Beatrice Potter (later Mrs. Sidney Webb), the philosopher 

 had close intellectual contact. While occupied with her long-continued 

 studies on working-class conditions, she came to realise that the 

 sphere of economics should include "social pathology," e.g. oppressive 

 labour conditions. In 1886 she wrote to him putting this point as 

 clearly as possible. He replied that on the contrary "political economy 

 cannot recognise pathological states at all. If these states are due to 

 the traversing of free competition and free contract which political 

 economy assumes, the course of treatment is not the readjustment of 

 the principles of political economy, but the re-establishment as far 

 as possible of free competition and free contract." In other words, 

 as she points out in her autobiography My Apprenticeship,'^ political 

 economy is an account of the normal conditions in industry. But is 

 not the first step to find out just what are the normal, or rather, the 

 healthy, conditions in industry.^ Spencer, however, had made up his 



1 (London, 1881.) ^ (London, 1893.) 



^ See E. Ferri's Socialism and Positive Science (London, 1906), p. 153. 

 ^ My Apprenticeship, by B. Webb (London, 1929), p. 292. 



